(June 29 2005) As Pandia reported last year Google has been testing a personalized search service for a time.

Last year’s version asked you to tick off categories of interest from a list, and Google would then adjust the listings, giving priority to web pages of relevance to these topics.

Google continues to ask you to set up a profile selecting categories of interest, and it will make use of this list when generating search engine result pages.

However, as Danny Sullivan has pointed out, Google is now also making use of data from its My Search History feature, a service that lets Google users manage past searches and previous search results.

Google knows better than anyone else that good quality search results generate loyal users. By generating search results adapted to the interests of the individual searcher, Google hopes that it will able to stay ahead in the search engine race.

The technology should also make it easier to fight the search engine spammers, i.e. webmasters who try to influence search results by more dubious means. If each user has his or her own search engine algorithm, it will be much harder to develop a winning search engine optimization formula.

For this feature to work, you must activate the Google Personalized search feature as well as My Search History.

See also: Google Blog